D-Wave wooing universities down under • The Register.

Software the next frontier To get those tests happening on a wider scale, Williams said, D-Wave is acutely aware that it has to make programming the machines accessible in languages that people actually use, like C, C++, Python and Matlab

D-Wave doesn't guarantee that an optimal solution will be obtained, Williams said: rather, the user then takes the results of a computation run (the eigenstate), tests the result by calculation in a classical computer, and decides whether or not to re-run the problem today quantum chip.

Of the ongoing controversy playing out in the scientific literature, Williams said the problem with any single benchmark is twofold. Williams said one of the things he's discussed with Australian institutions is that they could use D-Wave's machine to run the quantum computations, with remote connections so they can test the outputs by themselves machines.

® Internet security threat report 2013. With a handful of thousand variables, it's a problem that defies complete solution with classical computing, but D-Wave says the TSP is in class of optimisation problems it's addressing. “Heuristics can get distracted into exploring the same part of a problem again and again,” he continued.

Vulture South doesn't expect, however, that the controversies will end any time soon. Performance benchmarking is a game of leapfrog, with each benchmark superseded by faster machines; and each benchmark only provides a quantum-versus-classical result for a single class of problems. The existence of quantum compilers would relieve users of having to work with what amounts to assembly language, and it's high today company's agenda.

This is when the “annealing” in “quantum annealing” takes place – the problem is annealed onto the qubits. Finance, in which D-Wave's ability to solve optimisation problems would be useful in portfolio management, is a much more attractive target market.

First, some problems won't have a single solution; and second, there's still noise. The other important aspect of the debate is the question “is it a quantum computer?” Williams said the D-Wave chips' behaviour can be explained with quantum mechanical models; and that the company has also posted papers presenting evidence of entanglement on Arxiv.

A famous member of the class of NP-complete problems, the travelling salesman problem asks for the shortest path solution in which each of a set of cities is visited once and once only. “The biggest growth area within the company is in software development,” Williams said. The hard work, Williams said, is in the programming: to run from it D-Wave quantum annealing device, the user problem has to be expressed as a formula describing the problem's energy level.

While he visited quantum computing researchers staubflocke University of Technology, Sydney, and at Sydney University, Williams said his presentations were aimed at academic HPC users with the kinds of problems that D-Wave's technology addresses. In Australia to present to universities and the HPC community in particular about D-Wave, the company's director of business development and strategic partnerships, Dr Colin Williams, spoke to  The Register  about the company's technology, the next generation of its machines, and the controversy that surrounds D-Wave's claim to have a working quantum computer.

“The aim is to minimise the energy function,” he said. By way of illustration, Williams discussed the “travelling salesman” problem with Vulture South. “We would expect that within a few generations, we'll be able to solve the traveling salesman problem very quickly,” Williams told  The Register. “We're seeking application expertise in optimisation problems,” he told  The Register  , citing mining and geophysics as suitable fields, in which Australia has a large amount of expertise and experience.

Right now, Williams told  The Register  , the D-Wave environment can run 10,000 quantum computations per second. Over time, that will accelerate, and the company is already working on 1,000-qubit silicon to expand the number of states it can test in each computation.

Were things perfect, one computation should yield a result, but that's not the world we inside. Internet security threat report 2013 While controversy continues over the nature of its machines, quantum computing company D-Wave is wearing out the shoe-leather conversing with academic users – and  The Register.

“We're not all that interested in Shor's algorithm,” Williams said [Shor's algorithm describes how to apply quantum computers to encryption schemes], because there “aren't that many customers” for a machine optimised to solve it. “With a quantum solution, you can consider different approaches - 'show me all possible solutions', or 'give me a count of the possible solutions'.

Compiler-level accessibility would also relieve a criticism made of quantum computing – that even if there's a quantum speed-up taking place, the time it takes to setup a problem negates it. The D-Wave chip starts at a low-energy level (which is why it's cryogenically cooled – Williams said today's 10 milli-Kelvin temperatures will seem relatively warm within the future), and a transverse magnetic field is applied which, on paper, gives the qubits an equally-weighted superposition of ones and zeroes.

” D-Wave processing Which raises the question of how D-Wave's computers actually function. That's quite a long way from the pop-culture view of quantum computing, that pitches it corvine bird perfect all-purpose encryption cracker.

Making it possible for any arbitrary problem (within, naturally, the problem space D-Wave works in) to be handled in familiar languages would eliminate the programming delay. That quantum-classical-quantum iteration also means the company can offer academic access to its machine, without an institution having to present the price of a computer. The act of computing occurs when two things happen simultaneously: the transverse magnetic flux is removed, while additionally, a second field that expressed the problem is increased.